Al Gore is on cloud nine right now, as he’s been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to fight what’s popularly known as “man-made global warming” (or MMGW for short) Gore may have lost the controversial 2000 presidential race, but he has received two nice consolation prizes: this and an Academy Award for his documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Does a peace prize really mean that much, considering that former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the late terrorist Yasser Arafat and former president Jimmy Carter all have one? Gorbachev received his “peace” prize during a time in which he ordered Soviet troops in to crush Lithuania’s (then a Soviet republic) attempt at independence. Arafat was a terrorist whose idea of peace with Israel was for the Jewish people to evacuate Palestine while Carter’s foreign policies were absolute disasters.

If you’re waiting for Gore to hold open debates regarding the criticisms, you might be in luck. Junkscience.com, which has challenged Gore to debates before, announced that he will finally be participating. Meanwhile, Junk Science offers a reward on its site for anybody who can prove MMGW.

I’m not saying MMGW exists or doesn’t exist, but it bothers me when people like Mr. Gore (who, by the way, has no science degrees) insist that we believe them without encouraging people to get all the facts.